How to Do Things With Words

All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Taking Rights Seriously

Anarchy, state, and utopia

right are fully socialized by their family, civil society, and the state in order to prepare them for property ownership. When the state secures the property right through the establishment of institutions which codify the rights, define it, and punish those who violate it, it is bound by a certain logic: only private property creates free individuals, and persons are free to the extent they can exchange property in accord with rational desire. These free individuals in turn perpetuate the institution of private property by owning and exchanging property on the terms established by abstract right, which promotes the development of persons by permitting them to freely exercise their will upon the internal and external world. Because of the importance of property for personhood, the state must conscientiously choose to allow broad discretion for the acquisition, use, and alienation of property. Reading Philosophy of Right In the preface of Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes that “each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts.” As Jeremy Waldron notes, Hegel’s theory of private property the result of its status as an institution in his era, and he sought to discover what was rational about the institution and whether it contributed to human freedom. “[I]f we are led to agree with Hegel that private property is a rational necessity, then we will be inclined to give a positive evaluation of some features of society...([such as] those that represent a progressive tendency towards private ownership) and a negative evaluation...of others.” By seeking “standards of rationality within existing systems of thought and forms of life”, Hegel engages in a critique of private property as the apotheosis of freedom in the 1800s. To that extent, Joachim Ritter writes that it is important to understand that Hegel, despite

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Matthew Blake Wilson

Papers

What's So Private About Private Property?